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Inbox Master: Get all your inboxes to zero, and have fewer inboxes

Every Monday is Productivity & Organization Day at Zen Habits.

How many different ways do you get information? Five kinds of emails, text messages, voicemails, paper documents, regular mail, blog posts, messages on different online services (MySpace, Facebook, Netscape, et al) … the list could go on and on, and your processing of information certainly does. It’s an endless process, but it doesn’t have to be exhausting or stressful.

Getting your information management down to a less stressful level, to a more manageable level, and into a productive zone only takes a few simple steps. Read on for more, and your poor reading eyes will thank you.

First stage: Minimize your inboxes. Every place you have to go to check your messages or to read your incoming information is an inbox, and the more you have, the harder it is to manage everything. Cut the number of inboxes you have down to the smallest number possible for you to still function in the ways you need to. Here’s how:

  1. List all the ways you receive information. You might forget a few at first, but as you remember new ways, add them to the list. The list should include digital and analog information — paper and computer.
  2. Evaluate each to see if it gives you value. Sometimes we continue to check certain inboxes even if it’s not adding anything to our lives. It’s just more stuff to check. Have a pager when you also have a cell phone? Maybe the pager isn’t any use to you anymore.
  3. Find ways to combine or eliminate inboxes. If something’s not giving you value, consider eliminating it from your life. See if you can go a week without missing it. For all the rest, see if you can combine multiple information streams into one inbox. For example, how many places in your home do incoming papers get placed? Have one inbox at home for all mail, papers from work, school papers, phone notes, computer printouts, schedules, and more. Have four email services? See if you can forward them all to one service. Get different voicemails? Try forwarding them to one service, or use an internet service to deliver them to your email inbox. At work, have one inbox for all incoming paperwork. Read a lot of blogs? Put them all into a feedreader, in a single stream of posts, instead of having to check 25 different inboxes. The fewer inboxes you have, the better. Aim for 4-7 inboxes if possible.

Second stage: Master your inboxes. This stage will sound familiar to my long-time readers, but it should be covered here: Don’t allow your inboxes to overflow. This will create a huge backlog of stuff for you to go through, and it will definitely stress you out. Instead, become the master of your inboxes. Here’s how:

  1. Check and process your inboxes once a day. For some inboxes, you may need to check more than once (I check my email every hour), but don’t check constantly and obsessively. That just wastes your time and cuts into your productivity and real life. But don’t check less than once a day, because otherwise you’ll allow it to pile up. Piles are your enemy.
  2. Process it from the top down, making quick and immediate decisions. Start with the top item in your inbox, and make an immediate decision. Don’t skip over it or put it back in or delay the decision. Here are your choices: delete, delegate to someone else, do it immediately (if it takes 2 minutes or less), or defer it for later (add it to your to-do list). In all cases, don’t leave the item in your inbox. Delete or file it. Work your way down through each item until your inbox is empty. Note: if you have hundreds of items in your inbox, it might be good to toss them all into a folder to be processed later (and schedule a couple hours to do that), and then start this process with all new items from that point on.
  3. Repeat this process, to keep your inboxes empty. If you’ve minimized the number of inboxes you have, this shouldn’t be too hard. Celebrate when your inbox is empty! It’s a wonderful feeling. Remember: Don’t check them all day long — schedule your processing time — and definitely don’t have instant notification on.

See also:

Brilliant comments (13)

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David Hollingworth Says:

April 3rd, 2007, 8:52 am

Another great article on how to keep on top of all those inputs.

Just one little niggle. The top most link in the See Also list doesn’t work.

Mind you, that fact that it doesn’t work has saved me from ruining my productivity for today :)

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zenhabits Says:

April 3rd, 2007, 8:57 am

Thanks David, for the nice comment and for pointing out the broken link. It’s fixed now. I appreciate it! - leo

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Balfour Says:

April 3rd, 2007, 16:10 pm

Has anyone collapsed multiple email addresses into one or into a smaller number? There was a reason I set them all up - one for friends, one for family, one for commercial stuff (all my regular commercial email goes there), one “junk” account, ready for the potential of a lot of spam. Not to mention work and my .mac account (I don’t use .mac much). But, now that I’ve got them all, it seems like I shouldn’t mix them together. The multiple accounts are partly gradations of privacy -the commercial and the junk accounts I would be ready to shut down if they got overwhelmed with junk, but the other two accounts are addresses that I want to keep. I know they can be funnelled into one account, but I don’t see any real advantage to this. Anyone solved this?

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zenhabits Says:

April 3rd, 2007, 16:45 pm

Great question, Balfour. I’d like to hear what others have done concerning this as well.

I’d just like to say that if your current setup is working for you, and having multiple email accounts gives you value, that’s good too. The point of the article was to get you thinking about whether those are working or not, and if not, to eliminate or consolidate them.

As for myself, I’ve consolidated (over time) to one email for work, friends and family, although I opened a second account for this blog simply for privacy’s sake. While I love all you regular readers, there are simply too many spammers out there to put my real address on this site. Luckily, the excellent Firefox plugin, Gmail Manager, lets me check both my inboxes with one click.

What does everyone else do on this front? - leo

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Balfour Says:

April 3rd, 2007, 22:30 pm

Actually, I would like to have fewer email accounts to check and manage, but I don’t see how I can combine them, and I suspect I’ve just grown used to the complexity, but I just can’t see how to have it all in one as I once did.

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zenhabits Says:

April 3rd, 2007, 23:07 pm

Hi Balfour … I don’t know the specifics of your email account, but my suggestion is to find the account that works best for you, and let everyone else know that that’s your new primary account. When I migrated from Hotmail and Yahoo to Gmail, I sent out a mass email to let people know to update their contacts. Next, I set up a forwarding service from both old accounts to the new one. I also checked my old emails for about a month (less frequently than before) and would let people who were still using the old address know about the new address.

I’m not sure if that’s what you meant. As for the necessity of having different accounts, I haven’t found any problem in having one email for work and personal use. I have different signatures for each, which I enter with a couple of keystrokes (using AutoHotkey), but from the perspective of the recipients of my email, they don’t have any idea if it’s a work or personal email account, and they really don’t seem to care.

Regarding junkmail, if you use Gmail, as I do, you can add things to your address if you’re signing up for some commercial service, and use those things to filter out spam later. For example, if I’m signing up for a new online account somewhere, I can enter my email address as myname+servicename@gmail.com (where myname is my real user name, and servicename is the name of the service I’m signing up for), and it will go to my regular gmail account as if there were no +servicename attached. Later, if I find spam coming to this account, I can filter all emails with +servicename in the “to:” field and send them to spam. This has cut all my spam to a minimum (I don’t even get one a day anymore, while my hotmail and yahoo accounts continue to get dozens a day).

Checking one account rather than several has greatly simplified my life … I’m not sure if it would work better for you, but it’s something to consider.

I hope this helps! If I’ve misunderstood your question, let me know. - leo

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stayfly Says:

April 3rd, 2007, 23:18 pm

great post!

I’m using gmail as my be all and end all email account and I love it. I use the one gmail account to manage about 10 other email accounts! :)

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Balfour Says:

April 4th, 2007, 6:19 am

Thanks Leo. Gmail is one of my accounts, which I love and which is the best system, and that’s the one I thought I would collapse everything else into. I didn’t know that you can set up other names for specific purposes. I’m going to look into this, as I do spend a lot of time checking and maintaining all these accounts and gmail would definitely be better for some of my emails where I have a great deal of back and forth emailing.

I know you can connect other email accounts to gmail, which I did, but was disappointed and didn’t see the charm in this–maybe I haven’t spent enough time on that. stayfly: what is the advantage for you in maintaining the other accounts?

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Balfour Says:

April 4th, 2007, 12:40 pm

OK. I’ve started taking the plunge towards consolidating all my accounts into gmail. I figure if I just move everything over there, I’ll plumb the depths of gmail features more quickly than i have been and find new wonderful uses.

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Barry Says:

April 13th, 2007, 16:01 pm

Consolidating email into one account makes a lot of sense if only because you have just one inbox to check. It’s not efficient to log into various systems and/or accounts just to check email that can all be shown in one account. Gmail can consolidate for you with the Pop mail retrieval or forwarding. Better yet, use email aliases that all forward to one real email account. This will kill spam. One good free source for aliases is http://www.e4ward.com (I am not affiliated). If you want your incoming mail segregated, use the filtering options available to you in Gmail or whatever your system is.

I have an email account at the corporation where I work for all of my professional correspondence. I do not think it is appropriate nor would I want to receive personal mail there. Therefore I have a Gmail account for personal stuff. I use dozens of aliases that feed to my Gmail account. Just 2 mail boxes to check total. I would definitely not want it more complicated than that.

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Nico Says:

May 3rd, 2007, 4:39 am

I think this comic says it all, about multiple inboxes…
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=857

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searcher Says:

May 3rd, 2007, 17:04 pm

I am strong beleiver in keeping my inbox clean. Here is a funny yet helpful technique i use for inbox clean up while utilizeng my early morning hours:
http://practicingcommunicationskills.blogspot.com/2007/05/early-morning-inbox-clean-up.html

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Greg Says:

August 7th, 2007, 1:07 am

One thing I’d suggest, if you use Outlook.

I only keep current “to-do” in my inbox - BUT, 99% of them great created as a task in the Outlook Tasks list. You can really customize the view of that list a LOT (the default one isn’t great).

Once it’s on the task list, I manage it there (usually putting the original e-mail in the task), and the e-mail gets removed from my inbox (I currently have 1k+ tasks (99% “Completed”), and six e-mails in my inbox.

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